Bonus shield per nearby ally increased from 20/30/40/50/60 to 20/40/60/80/100.

Armor decreased from 27 [+3.25 per level] to 20 [+3.5 per level].

Wolf’s Frenzy [ W ]

No longer passively heals;

New Passive: Wolf’s attacks against jungle monsters now slow their Attack Speed and Movement Speed by 50% for 2 seconds.

Base Movement Speed increased from 325 to 330;

Base Mana increased from 292.4 to 350.

Glitterlance [ Q ]

Slow duration increased from 1/1.25/1.5/1.75/2 seconds to 2 at all ranks;

Targets beyond the first take 70% of Glitterlancer’s damage.

Whimsy [ W ]

Now additionally grants 15/20/25/30/35% bonus Attack Speed for the duration of the MS buff.

Ravenous Flock [ R ]

Cooldown increased from 10 seconds at all ranks to 20.

An Acquired Taste [ Passive ]

New Passive: Tahm Kench’s basic attacks and spells now deal an additional 1/1.25/1.5% (values for levels 1/11/16) of his Maximum Health as bonus magic damage. This value stacks up 3 times (up to 3/3.75/4.5%) against enemy Champions.

Tongue Lash [ Q ]

Base damage increased from 80/125/170/215/260 to 80/130/180/230/280.

Thick Skin [ E ]

Cooldown decreased from 16/15/14/13/12 seconds to 6 seconds at all ranks;

Passive now stores 70/75/80/85/90% of damage dealt as gray health, decreased from 100%;

Gray health now returns 25/30/35/40/45% of its value back as normal health, increased from 20/26/32/38/44%;

Duration of active shield decreased from 6 seconds at all ranks to 3, but the shield no longer degenerates over the duration.

Abyssal Voyage [ R ]

Passive removed (replaced with a weaker version in the Acquired Taste changes);

Cast range on active increased from 4000/5000/6000 to 4500/5500/6500;

Maximum channel duration decreased from 15 seconds at all ranks to 6;

Delay on recast and time for warning ping to appear are both decreased by 0.5 seconds.

Damnation [ Passive ]

Dragon and Baron now drop 2 souls, up from 1.

Dark Passage [ W ]

0.5 AP ratio removed; instead, each soul grants Dark Passage one more point of shields.

Health decreased from 1.89 [+0.17 per level] to 1.2 [+0.15 per level].

Heya everyone, it’s been a lo~ong time since we’ve dropped a brand new mode, as we were busy building the RGM queue! To top it off, Nexus Siege is probably one of the biggest modes we’ve ever attempted making.

You came here to get details. ^_^ Let’s go.

Nexus Siege

TL;DR:

Nexus Siege is a round based attack & defense game mode, where teams take turns at sieging the enemy’s Nexus using an arsenal of deadly new Siege Weapons. The team who destroys the enemy’s Nexus in the fastest time wins!

Each team will take turns at sieging the enemy team’s base. Team 1 will set a time for destroying the enemy Nexus, then teams will swap sides. The longer Team 2 can hold out and defend, the more time they give themselves to push when its their turn to attack! If they can destroy the enemy nexus faster than Team 1 did, they win!

Siege Warp trinket and teleporting:

Both team have a variety of teleport pads to warp out to from fountain. Use the Siege Warp trinket to get into battle faster!

Crystal Shards:

This currency is the fuel for your siege Attack or Defense. All new Siege Weapons are purchased using Crystal Shards. Earn them by:

Attack side:
— Kill enemy champions
— Passively earned over time

Defense side:
–Kill enemy champions
–When the 1st tower in each lane is destroyed
–For each minion escorted and pushed into the enemy fountain
–Passively earned over time

Normalised EXP & Gold:

Gold & EXP are normalised for Nexus Siege across both teams. This means don’t worry about last-hitting, just push those minions as fast as you can!

Obliterator (Defense team only):

The Defense team is rewarded everytime they manage to safely escort and push a minion into one of the Attacking team’s fountains. If they can push 15 total minions up there, they trigger the Obliterator laser.

The Obliterator will kill all enemies in all lanes. All of them. Dead.
Very dead.
No seriously, get out of the lane if you’re not on the Defense team. :3
This is also a great lane reset for the Defending team, buying them precious extra minutes to stall.

Siege Weapons:

Both the Attack and Defense teams have 4 unique Siege Weapons they can purchase using Crystal Shards they earn during the game. All Siege Weapons use the Summoner Spell slot and are cast or deployed similar to Summoner Spells. You can carry up to 2 different Siege Weapons at once, and they do not stack in your Summoner Spell inventory (1 at a time). As you might have guessed, this also means there are NO Summoner Spells in Siege Mode. 🙂

Attack:

Siege Ballista

A long ranged siege engine that will hammer away at enemy towers. These are excellent for applying pressure on defending teams who continually turtle and never come out from under their towers.

Attach to a nearby tower giving you control of 3 beam blasts from the tower. This does SERIOUS damage to enemy champions. ‘Ruinate’ your enemies. Do it. 🙂

Tower Surge: Firestorm Bulwark

An emergency Zhonya style shield for your tower that makes it invulnerable for a few seconds, then WRECKS all enemies that were around it in a rain of missiles. Great for clutch saves on a tower about to go down, buying you precious extra time.

Entropy Field

Freezes all enemy minions and slows all enemy champs within it’s zone. Can completely change the balance of a team fight.

Flash Zone

Throw down a large area that gives all allied champions inside the zone unlimited Flash on a 1sec cooldown. Great for team engages or reaching hidden nests of Siege Ballistae.

We won’t be immediately turning this mode on for PBE, but it will be coming soon. As you guys can see, there’s A LOT we need to get through for testing, so once we flip it on all help is appreciated. <3

Let the siege begin. 🙂
— L4T3NCY

EDIT: Nexus Siege is now live for testing on PBE.

Known Bugs:
— Placeholder icons. There are many icons around the shop, siege weapons, buff bar, etc that are clearly placeholder. These will be updated as we go.
— Placeholder or missing sounds. There are a variety of sound FX that are still WIP or missing, these will be updated as we go.
— Titan bar icon for Crystal Generator will be removed. Ignore this feature.
— Shopkeepers are missing after the round swap. We’re still figuring out where they went (short vacation?)
— Siege Weapons in shop that you can’t afford aren’t correctly grey out, indicating that you can’t currently afford them.
— General performance. Low spec machines might struggle somewhat as we continue to optimise the mode’s visuals.
— End of Game screen has some new columns in it unique to Nexus Siege, but they are not yet hooked up and will look empty.
— Spectator. Various spectator bugs.

Check out the Pool Party skins for Draven, Dr. Mundo, Lulu, Rekâ€™Sai and Zac!

[ Reminder ] The PBE is a testing ground for changes. What you see here may not reflect what you see in Patch Notes. Remember that developers want your feedback so if you disagree with a change, you can always submit your thoughts on the PBE Community Forums.

Following Corki and Brand‘s VFX update, here are some tweaks to the animations on Nauti’s E and R:

The latest guide from Riot for niche champion roles covers how to play Jarvan in a solo lane:

BY LUQI

We’re back with another installment of Dark Horses! This time, we’ll be digging into Jarvan IV — while we’re used to seeing him do his princely duty in the jungle, he’s also very viable as a solo laner built for assassinating high-damage squishy targets.

Jarvan IV is most commonly played in the jungle, built as a tank with high mobility and crowd control to keep his enemies in line with strong gank pressure. While the idea of tanking damage for his people is all very nice and princely, we’re going to focus on Jarvan IV’s ability to do the dirty damaging work by himself.

Jarvan can get off to a strong start during laning phase, thanks to his threat of constant poke with Dragon Strike (Q) and the damage from his passive (Martial Cadence), which adds 10% of the enemy’s current health as bonus physical damage to his auto-attack. If you can use his tools wisely in lane, it shouldn’t be too hard to grind down your opponent’s health low enough to force them to go back to base or risk giving up a kill.

The tools that make Jarvan a powerful jungler also serve him well for dealing with enemy junglers; specifically, his E+Q combo (also known as the Flag ‘n’ Drag) quickly puts him in position to avoid trouble (or start his own). When he’s out of position in lane and the enemy jungler comes to gank, he can use this combo to knock up the jungler and escape without using Flash. Of course, he can also use his E+Q combo to quickly roam the map and gank other lanes, just like he does in the jungle.

Weâ€™ve talked about his damage and how strong Jarvan can be, but to really make a difference in the mid game Jarvan will need offensive items, especially the ones that have Armor Penetration. After laning phase, your job in teamfights is to jump onto the carries and explode them.

We’re used to thinking of Jarvan as a solid tank in his standard jungle role, but if you go for a full damage build, he won’t be able to handle taking damage very well. His W gives you a shield that slows enemies, which can be useful for buying you time and space to survive long enough for your teammates to help, but don’t expect this Jarvan style to do well in longer fights.

All-in on teamfights

If you blew your full Jarvan IV combo and your team didnâ€™t follow up, or your team didnâ€™t win the team fight and youâ€™re out of cooldowns, you can consider yourself pretty much dead. Jarvan’s assassination potential lies in his ability to burst a single enemy and hold him behind, especially in the early game. Remember: Princes don’t live long enough to become kings unless they only pick fights they know they’ll win.

Need to manage your mana

Jarvan is very mana-reliant, so make sure you keep a reserve pool of mana handy or you might have a problem finishing a combo or escaping a gank. If you need a little more safety in your laning phase, consider picking up a Crystal Flask to quench Jarvan’s mana thirst.

You can add Jarvan IV to your champion pool for 616 RP (30% off), and his Warring Kingdoms skin forÂ 945 RP (30% off) from April 9 until 11:59 PM PDT April 13.

DEMAAAAAAAAAACIIIAAA!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me atÂ @NoL_ChefoÂ or e-mail me at nolchefo@gmail.com.

TL;DR: Weâ€™re actively partnering with ISPs across North America to build a dedicated highway for League traffic. So far weâ€™ve built what we call the â€œnorth bridgeâ€, which services connections in the northern US and Canada. Work is ongoing, and the goal is to create a unique network dedicated to transporting League traffic across the shortest, most stable route possible.

Hi everyone,

Riot Ahab here again with a mini-update on whatâ€™s happening with the new dedicated League network weâ€™re building in NA. In case you missed the original announcement and Q&A we posted earlier in January, you can check it out here.

These updates will serve as a peek behind the curtain as we continue to build out this network across NA. We canâ€™t share all the nitty-gritty details due to contractual complexities and security concerns, but we can provide a picture of what weâ€™re doing as we go!

For this first update, letâ€™s explore an overview of what weâ€™ve already built up to this point: the first half of the network, which weâ€™re calling the â€œnorth bridge.â€ Currently, this bridge is pathing League traffic for the northern US and Canada and is built out of a series of strategically-placed PoPs (points of presence) with direct connections between them.

Whatâ€™s the â€œnorth bridgeâ€, and what the hell is a PoP?

Think of it this way: if this direct network is a dedicated highway for League traffic between you and the servers, think of the PoPs as â€œon-rampsâ€; they get your data on the highway to the servers in the most direct route as physically possible.

These PoPs consist of two elements:

Physical hardware: servers and switches placed in key cities

Peering agreements: contractual agreements set up with ISPs to funnel traffic directly to the closest PoP

The first part (physical hardware) is pretty straightforward: buy some server space and make sure the on-ramp allows League traffic to hurry along onto the highway.

The bigger challenge, as is true with real highways, is making sure local traffic finds its way to the on-ramp–otherwise the highway does little good! This is where peering agreements come in: these partnership agreements mean ISPs now redirect League traffic off of their networks and toward the nearest PoP.

Once weâ€™ve made a peering agreement with a local ISP (which for big ISPs, like any contractual arrangement with a big company typically takes a fair amount of lawyering back and forth), thereâ€™s often a decent amount of necessary fine-tuning with that ISP.

This is important because different ISP algorithms can send traffic bouncing around before it loops into one of our PoPs, much like poorly laid-out street signs could send you driving several towns over and back again before finally finding a PoP on-ramp. Which means on our end we have to track down inefficient pathing routes and work with the ISP to redirect that traffic to make sure itâ€™s taking the most direct route to the closest PoP. It takes a little work, so bringing a PoP online and securing peering agreements doesnâ€™t always mean that everything is working as it should from the get-go. Plus, ISPs change– things break, they merge with other ISPs, split up, new ones may come, and old ones may go, which makes peering and fine-tuning a constant, ongoing process.

With that in mind, hereâ€™s a look at the direct network as it exists today:

Red dots represent live PoPs weâ€™ve set up so far. In those areas, weâ€™ve installed hardware and are actively working through agreements with local ISPs. Grey dots indicate PoPs that are still in-progress. Weâ€™ll post additional updates as those grey dots come online.

This map doesn’t show the direct paths connecting the PoPs, but if you connect the red dots you can see that the north bridge is largely complete. We still have plenty of peering contracts to negotiate with ISPs in these markets so we can make sure local traffic is taking the best possible path to its local PoP, but weâ€™re off to a good start. Typically, we first target the biggest ISPs in any given market because many major ISPs often provide traffic peering routes to smaller local ones (and youâ€™ll find a list of ISPs that weâ€™re currently partnering with at the bottom of this post). So if youâ€™re on a smaller ISP, your connection could likely peer through the larger ISP companies we have agreements with and already be on this new network!

So what does all of this mean?

Connections running through this network should experience a more stable, consistent experience while playing League, since itâ€™s taking the most direct route possible to the game servers. When Phase 3 of the NA Server Roadmap deploys, this network will provide as many players as possible a comparable ping when connecting to the more centralized server location. But we’ll speak more on that in the future!

Live nearby a red dot on the map above? Experienced any drastic fluctuations to your connection in the past few months? Let us know in the comments below. Knowing your local postal code as well as ISP helps us figure out how your data is being routed, but keep in mind if your ISP isnâ€™t yet on the list of current partners below, thereâ€™s a chance your data might not be pathing through our network yet.

Weâ€™ll post our next NA Server Roadmap update with what weâ€™re actively doing to deliver a consistent quality League connection as well as let you guys know once weâ€™ve started bringing the southern bridge online.

Until then, thanks for reading! Weâ€™ll stick around for the next 4 hours to answer whatever questions we can.

Cheers,
-Riot Ahab

US & Canadian ISPs weâ€™re currently partnering with and still tuning how things work:
(note: this list is constantly growing as conversations and contracts develop, but at the time we can only list those weâ€™ve completed peering agreements with!)

Itâ€™s back! For a limited time, surprise yourself with a Mystery Skin!

Purchasing a Mystery Skin will unlock an unowned skin worth 520 RP or more (that could get you a discount of 84% off a skin)! As with the previous rounds of Mystery Skins, you can only unlock skins for champions you own.

Mystery Skins will be available in the Skins tab of the store forÂ 490 RPÂ and are limited to five per day. Grab your Mystery Skins fromÂ now until 23:59 on February 2!

TLDR:Â Our player behavior philosophies include punishment, reform and positive reinforcement. With rewards, we have to be careful to design systems that donâ€™t simply incentivize positive behavior for a small duration, but provide reasons to stay positive all the time.

Hello again!

Last time, I mentioned that Drevarius would go into a deeper dive on punishment in this blog, but with the surprise Mystery Gift for positive behavior going out to 95% of players in 2014, we wanted to take the opportunity to jump ahead and explore our philosophies around rewards and positive reinforcement.

One of our core philosophies is that there’s no silver bullet to improving player behavior in online games, and you always need a mix including punishment, reform, and positive reinforcement.

In 2014, we focused on the community and self-reflection. We ran a few experiments,Â including an exercise where players reflected on their last 10 gamesÂ and we all came to the conclusion that the one negative experience that happens occasionally should not define our community. With Snowdownâ€™s celebration of everyone coming together to be a part of the Legend of the Poro King, it was a great opportunity to deliver a positive behavior surprise.

One of the keys of positive reinforcement is the idea of â€œschedules,â€ or the expected frequency of a reinforcing event. Introducing surprise rewards unrelated to specific activities or durations is one of the most effective ways to encourage positive player behavior. The surprise element is crucial: imagine an achievement system where, if you are sportsmanlike for your next 10 games, you unlock a free skin. Players could simply behave for 10 games, unlock their gift and go back to playing the same way they were before (whether thatâ€™s positive, negative or neutral). So, instead, weâ€™ll continue to surprise players once in awhile for their positive behavior. Because players aren’t sure what the next reward is (or when it is), players will strive to be sportsmanlike in a larger range of games to try to get all the surprises.

For positive players in the game, this won’t really affect them and they’ll just get surprises every so often for being awesome. For neutral players, this effort might convince some of them to put in that extra effort in a few more games to get the next surprise. For negatively behaved players, this effort might also encourage a few to change their ways although we expect the biggest impact to be with the neutral players.

In future roll-outs itâ€™ll be possible for players to earn the next surprise so long as they’ve been positive since the last surprise was awarded. So, if you were chat restricted and missed a surprise, youÂ could still be eligible if you were positive in the time range between that one and the next.

Also, keep in mind that not every surprise will be a mystery gift. Every surprise will differ in magnitude, and be tailored to different players. For example, the last surprise before the end of Snowdown gift was an IP Boost, mainly beneficial for newer players still building out their champion pools. Other surprises may include collectibles like unique summoner icons (which some players will remember weâ€™ve tried before with the Santa Baron icon).

In the last blog in this series, weâ€™ll be back to discuss punishment as a deterrent for negative behavior and our philosophy around it. Thanks as always, and weâ€™ll see you in game!

TLDR: We did a pretty poor job ensuring you guys got the full reasoning for why we were doing this, and I really dropped the ball here. I failed to ensure that our patch notes reflected the intent of these changes, nor did I give Pwyff and crew nearly enough info to make that possible for them. I’m here to give the full context and also talk about how these changes fit into our strategy around the jungle right now.

So, the 5.1 “Smite with Charges!” change does a lot of cool stuff for the strategic freedom of the jungler, but we also knew that it would hit some of the same issues the Conservation mechanic had from season 4. Mainly, when you’re not ‘wasting’ a resource with overflow, it creates very clear windows for the jungler to go do something else with a very low cost. In other words, a jungler waiting for Smite to come off cooldown can gank or go kill wards without feeling like they’re making a deliberate trade for it.

Combined with a few junglers that could grab a camp or two and then bring out very potent ganks, this meant that 5.1 created a situation where the optimal strategy for some of our most powerful gankers was to go back to their old habits of deciding lanes before laners had even hit level 2 (in some cases). Worst of all was that failing these ganks didn’t really set these junglers behind, because many other junglers didn’t have the ability to invade and punish them after the failed gank.

The adjustments were made to hit this specifically, so that guys like Jarvan and Lee Sin had a bit more of a risky start if they tried this, as would Shaco, Xin, and Panth, even if they’re not currently centered in the spotlight.

We are aware that this change hurts some of the junglers with weak clears, leaving them with less gold for pots to stay healthy during their second clear. We know this is really painful when blind monks and dunking princes are taking over games. We know have a lot of work ahead of us. We’ve been making changes and adjustments to the systems around the jungle at a really high frequency, and that’s largely complicated the work that could have been done on the individual items or the champs. We’ve already been having a lot of internal discussions about what we need to do as the dust settles on the systematic changes. The 5.2 changes happened because we know early gankers needed to be much higher risk, and the extremely cheap jungle items were a main contributor to their reliability.

We still need to carve out more space for our tank junglers, and we are still trying to give junglers more reason to invade and counter jungle. These actions are one of the core reactions necessary to keep gankers in check, and currently aren’t functioning at the levels necessary for healthier play. Can’t say it enough, we have lots of work ahead of us still, and we’re committed to making this better. 5.3 is already very tight for changes, so 5.4 is much more likely for the next round of changes.

Totes my bad on the context in the patch notes. Reading back on it, it definitely reads like we didn’t acknowledge the full problem. Something to learn for the future definitely.

As an aside, we talk a lot about making precise changes that directly target the problem – I think for this one we took a more broad approach that ended up ‘hurting’ a lot of junglers, even if it was more directly aimed at aggressive level 2 gankers (Lee / J4 / Shaco / Panth / Xin). We’re aware, we’re looking into it.

We knew the items enabled a pattern, a pattern that JarvSin ( Lee Vin?) were able to opt into, but it’s not just them. The items created too low of a threshold for success for a jungler’s first few minutes. The item adjustment needed to fix that issue with the system, and would need to even if those dudes weren’t generally strong.

Also as I posted, it’s been very hard to make changes to individual champions while we’re also making so many large systematic changes. Trying to get the systems of the game stable gives us a lot more space to hit the champs we need to it, and more excitingly, start bumping up the champs that we think we’ve pushed down with the system changes.

The actual reason why Lee tends to due really well through many rounds of changes is because he’s incredibly flexible, very poorly stat bound (can do well with a huge range of builds), grants a lot of power that cannot be repressed through systematic changes. As stated above, he needs to be changed, and we know that many functions of the jungle changes won’t be realized without those changes.

On balance philosophy – we realize that our strategy for who we balance for isn’t well articulated. Do we balance for LCS or for Silver players? Or both? We’re trying to make sure we agree on what our actual goal is, because I think “We balance for everyone!” is a little too precious and unrealistic.

We’ll communicate our strategy when we’ve made sure we’re on the same page. Balance philosophy is a topic that greatly interests me. I don’t make the individual tuning changes personally (and you wouldn’t want me to) so I can’t provide as much context on specific patch notes, though I do help set the philosophy and direction for what kinds of changes we try to make.

Related, “win rate” gets used a lot as synonymous with balance, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. We need to communicate better about what game balance means to us, because there’s more to it than that. A lot of what you’re discussing in this thread is sort of “pre-balancing.” We’re making a change (that we have wanted to make for some time!) by removing DFG, and we know that change would have big ramifications if we didn’t adjust some champs to compensate. Those adjustments, while grounded in math, playtesting and player feedback, still often come down to educated guesses, because we don’t have the data from thousands of live games yet. A more accurate but painfully slow way to balance is to make one change, see how the live game reacts, then make another change in response to that. We think this would feel worse overall.

On design accountability — it totally exists. It’s part of my job to make sure it exists. Now, it’s not the kind of thing you’re likely to see a lot. We’re not going to publicly flog designers for making mistakes, though I can understand why that might be cathartic. On the other hand, designers (and anyone at Riot really) should be upfront and honest with you guys about when they think they’ve made a mistake.

On designers buffing champions that they like to play — this would be a big accountability issue. As someone pointed out, while we are all gamers here, this is also a place of business with a product (LoL) and customers (you guys). It’s royally unprofessional to try and tweak the game to benefit your own personal games. That’s a serious breach of trust (Rioter and players) that would come with serious consequences. We may make changes you don’t understand or don’t agree with, but it’s not because we’re trying to boost our own ELO.

On Lee and Thresh — they are champions we like, but more importantly, they also resonate with a lot of players. It’s not a popularity contest, but on the other hand, we believe a lot of why people play them is because they are fun to play, not just because they win a lot. Both champs have a lot of cool abilities, and arguably they both have so many that a) neither has a lot of weaknesses, and b) they compliment almost any comp you try to build. We’re trying to figure out ways to make them less awesome in every situation without stripping away what is fun about them. For example, last year or so we tried to tone down Lee’s mobility and ward hopping, but it felt terrible, and largely due to player feedback (intelligent, meaningful feedback, not whining and pitchforks) we reverted it.

As always, we appreciate the feedback. The more targeted and actionable it is, the more useful it is for us. I can go tell the balance team “Boards say you suck” and they would kind of look at me and say “Okay, what changes in how we adjust champions should we make?” and I would say “You just suck.” There’s not really a lot of direction for improvement there.

One of the options we’re looking at at the moment is whether we should play up Morde’s tankier side a bit more. Huge guy in a full suit of armor with a passive that generates a shield suggest tough front line dude. The removal of DFG already shifts him away from bursting down a target almost instantly, our thinking is that offering him a more sustained presence might be a good approach as a result. That’s very much an idea being explored right now though, not yet a proven direction.

Assassin Master Yi is still the most purchased skin overall due mostly to free RP. But the record for most skins purchased during release was set by a new skin in 2014. Any guesses? I’ll tell you if the most upvoted guess is right or not.

UPDATE: As of 11:45am PST, the most upvoted guesses are:

1) The ultimate skin that wasn’t

2) Project Yasuo

3) Dragonslayer Pantheon

and the answer is……..

1) Haha good one – maybe we’ll make up for it in 2015. Or maybe not.

2) Yes! Congrats Reddit.

3) Not the winner of this prize, but it WAS the most played 2014 skin in my personal quest for challenger (which sadly fizzled out somewhere in gold).

Â It’s time for a new patch! We don’t have a ton of changes today, but we’re hitting a few high priority targets that are having a heavy impact on the health of the game. As an example, we’re still concerned with high-damage junglers who are entering the mid-game with more gold and more experience than even the solo laners who had to scrap out their gains against another opponent. We’re still exploring the possibilities here, but for now we’re going to be reducing some of the power of Feral Flare so that it remains a unique item build without being a dominant strategy.

Â So what else can you expect in this patch? We’ve got a few rework follow-ups in the form of Gragas and Kassadin, and we’ve been experimenting with Skarner on the interim. We know we mentioned Skarner in the 4.6 foreword, but we’ve got a stronger idea of where we can give back some of his old identity so we’re making sure we get it right this time.

Â We’re also following up with our promised top lane buffs for Jarvan IV and Malphite. We’re already seeing more diversity in top lane beyond Renekton, but we’ll be keeping an eye on future candidates as the changes shake out.

Â Finally, we’re making some changes specifically targeted at competitive play in the form of reduced trinket start cooldowns, increased gold rewards for the Dragon, and additional tradeoffs for fast-push strategies. We don’t expect these changes to have too much of an impact on regular play, but we’re hoping to hit some dominant strategies we’re seeing in the high-level competitive scene.

Â And that’s about it! On a closing note, you may notice this patch is a bit bigger than usual – we’re shipping out files for a new audio engine in manageable chunks over the next several releases. We’ll have more information to share with you closer to the end of the process, but you shouldn’t notice any changes to the game until the new engine launches.

You can check out the full scope of the patch below. See you next time!

Minimap Bug – Icons popping up

Â Â Riot Feithen:Â Hi folks,

In today’s patch we’ve fixed one case that was causing the mini-map vision bug. For those not familiar with the bug, it’s where an enemy champion icon appears on the edge of the fog of war for a split second in the wrong location. It quickly jumps to the correct location where the champion is actually standing (usually somewhere across the map). In the absolute worst case you would see the champion model and particles in the wrong location.

Our fix should lower the frequency of the issue significantly: we’d like to know if you guys feel like it’s improved. Please post any feedback in this thread.

Thanks,

Fei

Shaco has been suffering in popularity in Season 4. What does Riot plan to do to get the Jester of the League back in the jungle?Â

Do you have a general clue what you want to do with Shaco?

Â Â Meddler:Â We’ve got a direction in mind for him, yes. Goals are solid, exactly how they’re met, ability details in particular, very much a work in progress.

Â Â Meddler:Â 1. We’re still working on Shaco. Other reworks however are being given a higher priority (Xerath/Skarner being close to done, Sion being a major project that’s in the early stages, Kassadin and Rengar both having much more urgent needs due to their impact on game health/other players, a couple of low gameplay impact reworks to accompany visual upgrades).

2. Shaco’s a pretty difficult character to rework well. It’d be really easy to just strip away all his problematic elements and in the process remove many of his tricks and distinctive skills that people really enjoy when playing him. Finding the correct ways to fix his issues and preserve as much of his gameplay identity as possible however is much tougher, involving a lot more analysis, playtesting, iteration and sometimes, if something isn’t working as hoped, restarting, than many other champions would.

Hope that explains a bit on why rework timing can vary, and why it can be hard to make any concrete estimates or promises on a rework’s ETA.

TLDR: Lots of different types of rework, Shaco’s a tricky one.

Why did the Rengar rework take priority over Shaco’s?

Â Â Xelnath:Â The path for Rengar was much clearer than Shaco. For Rengar, we knew we wanted to clean up his core abilities a little bit, experiment with bonetooth, remove some exploits, then experiment with some ideas for his ultimate.

Shaco requires more tinkering. In the worst of cases, Shaco is frustrating to play against, stifling and frustating for everyone in lane, is an uncatchable split pusher and can lay traps that murder you without a chance to counter Shaco.

So why is Shaco still in this state?

Â Â Xelnath:Â Basically, what I am saying is that Shaco’s rework is not on the near horizon, despite being discussed in the past. We had a couple awesome leaps forward, then sat down, looked at the champion list as a whole (see Meddler’s post) and prioritized to suit the upcoming year and champions best.

I really want to reinforce this – meaningful reworksÂ take a long time to do rightÂ unless they are minor updates or quality of life improvements.

Shaco is a cool character. We want to do cool characters right. Shaco has some very harsh edges in his playing against experience. Thus we need to do more work than just a few minor tweaks.

What happened to his Rework? Why is it being delayed so heavily?

Â Â Xelnath:Â In this case, the guy who was working on the Shaco rework switched his time and energy to help us deliver preseason. I’ve learned in the past year, that people get very “fast” expectations when we talk about things – this is just a side-effect of not framing “hey, I’m looking at this” properly.

To be fair – I expected to ship Xerath in August when I started working on him in May… but as we all see now, it ended up being another 6 months before other important things got done and we were able to schedule team time to finish Xerath.Â

Why is Shaco a problematic Champion?

Â Â Xelnath:Â He’s best played as a split-pusher who is nigh uncatchable, an assassin who can’t team fight, an ambusher who can’t be countered, if you are chasing him into a next(p.s. does anyone know if red trinket disables his boxes or not?)

And once he starts to get ahead of you, he has a permanent slow in addition to a backstab + crit multiplier – aka, once he wins, if he catches you away from a tower, you don’t have a good way to escape.

The different kinds of Reworks – are Reworks scrapped all the time?

Â Meddler:Â Sometimes true, depends on what the rework involves and why it’s being done though. Reworks generally fall into one of a few different categories:

1. Those that accompany a visual upgrade for a champion. Sivir’s a good example of this, where our art team had plans for an upgrade to Sivir’s appearance so we took the opportunity to pair some gameplay changes with that upgrade. Visual upgrades are great opportunities to do valuable, not not immediately urgent, gameplay work on a champion, because since animations/particles/sound etc are being redone anyway changing how abilities function is easy to support.

Timing on these reworks is tied to the readiness of the visual upgrade.

2. Those done because a character has gameplay issues that are creating significant problems at present. This is the category that Kassadin and Rengar currently fall into. This is the most urgent category, and one where we’ll put a lot of focused effort into finding a solution, since the alternative’s nerfing the champion so much the issue’s aren’t a major problem (something we’re really trying to avoid where possible).

Timing on these reworks is dependent on how quickly we can identify and valid an appropriate solution to gameplay problems.

3. Reworks on a champion who’s not a major problem, but has the potential, with some adjustments bigger than just number tweaks, to be healthier, more effective, a better take on their theme etc. This is the category Shaco falls into. He’s not creating massive problems, but he struggles if unable to snowball and/or splitpush, and can be a noticeably more frustrating experience than average to play against.

Timing on these reworks can be variable, since they’re much more dependent on how well an initial idea works out, what other responsibilities the person working on the rework also has and whether other emergent works pops up that needs to take priority (e.g. reworks from category 2 above).

4. Reworks on champions that aren’t in particular need of work, and may even be really good already, but that someone believes could be better still. These reworks are side projects, sometimes done in someone’s own time, because they’ve got some cool ideas they want to test out/a vision for how a champion could be better. The Miss Fortune changes ricklessabandon’s testing at the moment are a good example of this. MF’s not a problem, fun to play and well designed. That’s not to say there might not be some good opportunities to smooth out some smaller stuff or enhance her play a bit though.

Timing on these reworks is extremely variable and these are the reworks most likely to get put aside (most often because an idea, when investigated and tested didn’t work out, sometimes because something does work well but is a better fit for another rework, new champion or an item).

Â Xelnath:Â Reworks can take like a year and sometimes get canned or sent back to the drawing board repeatedly. I wouldn’t expect too much in the way of updates for a while.

Edit:Â Reworks take a long time. Xerath had 18 thrown away kits before he got to PBE. Shaco’s going through similar kinds of exploration to distill the best features of his kit. See Meddler’s post for details – I know it sucks to hear, but Shaco is a lower priority than Sion, Skarner, Xerath and some other champions.

Can you comment on Yorick’s state?

Â Â Meddler:Â We’ll definitely do some really substantial work on Yorick at some point – gravedigger/necromancer offers a lot more potential than just what’s on his current kit. That’ll be a fair way off though, he’s potentially a Sion sized project and there are only so many of those we can have underway at once (not to say he’ll necessarily be the next major rework post Sion either, there are other good candidates like Poppy that would be worthwhile too).

Can we have an ETA on when Sion’s Rework will be live?

Â Â Meddler:Â Apologies, timing’s something I’m going to have to be vague on. Would be extremely surprised though if he took as long as a year for what it’s worth. He’s a big project (roughly the same amount of work as a new champion), but also one of our priorities this year.

Is Graves getting any kind of Rework?

Â Â ZenonTheStoic:Â Very early ideation. Not a rework as much as a minor touch up as well, from my understanding. What I’ve heard boils down to “do more damage the closer you get”. No one has implemented any changes much less tested them yet.

Is Viktor still slated for a rework?

Â RiotScruffy:Â Honestly we would like to make improvements on so many champions (Viktor included), but right now he is not an active project. It is definitely noted that there are so many people interested in and hoping for some Viktor changes.

Â Â Xelnath:Â We realized it was a much bigger ball of yarn than it appeared to be. We had some specific ideas regarding his unique item, how to improve the feeling of his laser, etc. And it required a lot more work than we could support while getting trinkets, vision updates, new jungle, etc.

Since then, Solcrushed has still been looking at the jungle (see the new spirit stones and some work on the Wriggles line).

Post preseason, we took the time to sort out the reworks but I don’t recall where he ended up.

Why did you pack all the changes to Vision, Jungling and Supporting, into one patch?

Â Xelnath:Â The reason we did those things together was to try to bundle most of the “okay, how I have to think about the entire game has completely changed for everyone” factor into a single patch.

It’s easier to accept, “okay, I’ve got some big changes to learn, but so does everyone else”. For example, just doing the jungle item rework would be all of the junglers are in flux, but everyone else feels kind of the same.

Bundling changes together means players can kind of go through a mutually shared experience of re-experiencing summoner’s rift.

Re: Losing things – part of improving a game is culling features too. The opposite is feature bloat, champion sprawl and creeping complexity.

Xerath’s been on the PBE for quite some time and his new kit is close to hitting live. What makes him a better pick this time around?

Â Â ZenonTheStoic:Â Lux’s kit is problematic in that she is a “fish for root, 100 to 0” pattern. This means we don’t have a lot of levers to adjust her if she ever does become problematic. Her pattern is all or nothing. Sure her ult fits in that, but I think Lux’s ult is much more interesting when used at long range.

I’m hoping that the amount of damage and range Xerath gets (it IS the highest range in the game) make the ult compelling. But most importantly, even if that is not the case when he goes live, we’ve created a kit that ALLOWS us to tweak these levers. By divorcing the ultimate from the full burst case of the basic kit we’ve made it ADJUSTABLE. I’m not saying it’ll be perfectly well adjusted when it goes live, but we have the tools we need now.

Will you keep Xerath’s strong teamfight presence?

Â Â ZenonTheStoic:Â His Q, which he typically maxes first, goes down to a 5s cooldown. New Xerath hangs around the edges of a teamfight, constantly trying to snipe a high value target. Between that and his W cooldown generally allowing him 2 or 3 casts per fight as well, we find he has very strong teamfight presence.

Let’s also talk about his ult, because I see a lot of mentions of that in this thread!

The way I see it, you can do a lot of different things with mage kit ultimates. One of them is to have an ult that perfectly slots into the kit. Think of Brand: Brand wants to AOE dudes with W/E or just burst one guy out. Pyroclasm helps him do either of these things better. What this means is that Brand has one kit, but every so often that kit is a LOT stronger. He needs to decide when to use his ultimate (generally whenever he feels he can get a kill with it) and then commit to that fight. While his ult is down, he generally does the same kind of thing, only less powerfully. That is a perfectly fine way for a mage kit to work.

Ahri works a little differently from this. Ahri is about poking and fishing for an E hit confirm. When she has her ultimate ready, however, she becomes an all in assassin who zips around the battlefield, getting a kill and using her remaining dashes to get to safety (hopefully). Whether or not her ultimate is up very much defines what she can or cannot do.

Then there are guys like TF and Karthus, where the ultimate isn’t so much part of a rotation as it allows them to exert their influence strategically. This might be to follow up aggression from their team mates, clean up after an exchange they were involved in, or to capitalize on an enemy finding themselves in a compromising situation; say someone being brought to low health by doing Baron/stepping on a Teemo shroom or someone walking over a ward, revealing that their far from their team. Xerath very much falls into this category.

The coolest uses I’ve seen for Xerath ultimate are for instance firing in the path of an enemy ADC who is running from a gank in bot lane (forcing them to make the decision between eating Xerath ult damage or potentially letting the enemy bot lane / jungler catch up with them), stalling out a team from doing Baron (you do not want all three shots to hit multiple people on your team while they’re doing Baron) or to put damage into a team fight when the enemy team has a diver intent on taking out Xerath every single time (Xerath just hangs 1500/2000 units back, waits for the two teams to commit, then shells the teamfight with his ultimate and joins to clean up with his basic kit).

No, Rite of the Arcane will not work as part of his normal in-fight rotation. That is very much by design. The fact that Arcane Barrage worked as part of Xerath’s rotation on live was contributing heavily to Xerath’s biggest game health problem, which is that he is super high burst champion who, if he ever got popular, would have to be balanced around his full kit burst. That way lie boring/safe damage numbers.

Why did you remove Xerath’s % Penetration?

Â Â Meddler:Â R.e. the removal of the % Magic Pen – we wanted to really reinforce Xerath’s niche as a really long range poke/siege mage. That sort of range gives freedom of target selection. As a result giving him more raw damage, and therefore ability to be effective against a range of targets was a better fit than giving him % magic pen, and therefore focused effectiveness against a subset of enemies who he generally doesn’t need that range to reach (the enemy front line).

The long-awaited Sion Rework is finally being talked about!

Summoner Feedback

Â Hellioning:Â Now, I’m sure everyone is aware that Sion is an issue. He has two real builds; ap and ad. AP completely ignores two of his skills and instead focuses on a point and click that removes the intended counterplay to his exploding shield, that is, blow it up before it can respond. While this is fine in a teamfight environment, since he can only stun one champion and their teammates can explode the shield, it is incredibly hard to play against in a lane enviroment. This build also falls off in late game, due to the ease of which a full team of five can explode his shield, therefore completely neutering his damage. It also completely ignores his theme; he’s a giant zombie with an axe that is a big Ahnuld fan. He should not be a mage.

Meanwhile, his AD build takes forever to build up to a reasonable level. While this build does not ignore his shield and stun, they are much weaker and only used for the utility and survivability they bring. After he gets his items, he gets much stronger, so he can right click people and kill them during the stun. This makes much more sense in regards to his theme, but is also incredibly boring.

Now, it’s no secret he’s getting reworked, because when people think ‘clunky kits’ Sion is either the first or second champ they think besides Urgot (incidentally, both are reanimated Noxian warriors. Coincidence?) The issue is ‘what IS Sion?’ Theme wise, it’s obvious; he’s a giant axe-swinging zombie that quotes Schwarzenegger, so he should have something akin to Darius’ kit. When it comes to gameplay, however, people are far more attached to his AP mage pattern. Even if it’s impossible to play against, that shield is so much fun when it explodes. Something has to change; but what?

Please post your comments and concerns in this thread; IronStylus has promised to post this thread on his twitter and hopefully get some discussion going, so he can properly express the average player’s opinion to the relaunch team. Hopefully, we can make a Sion that everyone enjoys or, at the very least, everyone can tolerate.

Â IronStylus:Â Great ideas here. There’s not much I can add in terms of mechanics, but I can say that these ideas can slot in very well to the overall thematics. Something specific which you’ve mentioned is being this slow, un-killable, unstoppable undead force, who, yes, would have died previously. I think this is a core characteristic.

Another thing that you’ve said about his axe not defining him, I think you’re correct there. Sion himself is the focus here. He’s a brute, maybe one that was consumed by such uncaring murderous momentum in his time in the Noxian military. Almost a precursor to Darius, maybe a similar position as Darius not commands. A idea we had is that Darius might even be the modern day incarnation of what Sion’s “style” used to be. Sion might have been a great ax wielder (though a more primitive style) in the past, but is now this lumbering monster where his ax is just representative of his brute strength. It’s used in more of a clobbering, smashing way than a precise slicing that Darius does.

This also adds into potential story lines. We can draw parallels back into Sion’s previous life, perhaps in the heyday of the Noxian-Demacian war. Whatever might have transpired there could have caused his death and eventual arcane reanimation. But, that’s just it, he’s a behemoth which has been brought back, reinvigorated with undeath. Not really a Frankenstein which has been put together from other people’s parts, Sion is still quinticentially Sion, just an undead extension of his brutal formar sense.

We’re playing around with the idea that maybe he’s sort of like.. if the US were to resurrect a great war hero. What would that person be like in present day? What would they retain? We surmise that in undeath they’re motivations would sort of taper off where they’re core craft still exists, or their fighting spirit is still there. Maybe Sion is Noxus’ George Washington or General Patton, resurrected. Who knows!

“he FEELS NO PAIN, NO REMORSE, THERE IS ONLY DEATH. And if you kill him? I’LL BE BACK!”

That’s a great sentiment, like Prince Vigo from Ghostbusters minus the maniacal mentality 😛

Thanks for the feedback!

Is Sion’s character defined by his axe?

Â FeralPony:Â Jumping in real quick as I’m working on the mechanics design on Sion. It’s a bit early to start talking specific mechanics here since we’re still very early in the process but I do want to confirm that we’re aligned on the thematic goals. Sion is an undead juggernaut.

Sion does have an axe and he needs to hit people with it. As to your concern of does the axe define him? Not at all. As far as I’m concerned mechanically the axe only exists because it’s the tool in his hands he died with and he uses it to break people. It’s about force and impact, not cutting and precision. Mechanically his weapon could just as easily be a hammer, a tree trunk, or a lead pipe. It just needs to hurt people and act as an extension of his force and brutality.

As for your concerns of him being a reskinned Darius I have no desire to tie Darius and Sion together mechanically despite being thematically tied (Sion is basically an older, deader, Champion of Noxus). They both have axes but that isn’t enough for us to make them similar. Just as Garen and Yi both have swords but are totally unrelated.

I am going to very upfront on one point though despite being very early in development, I have no intent or desire to retain the current AP Sion playstyle. It doesn’t make sense thematically, visually, or have much mechanically worth salvaging. Run at a bro – click to stun then explode before they can react is really harmful to the game as a whole and is an incredibly frustrating and binary experience. It simply is not worth preserving. We are trying out versions of the character where we keep the exploding shield because it is a really solid tank mechanic and has some cool gameplay around it. But the current Q is most definitely getting removed.

What sort of DPS do you think is appropriate for Sion?

Â Â FeralPony:Â It’s a little mathy but yeah it’s something I’ll definitely consider. He is a champion that I think would look silly at 2.5 attacks per second. I’d rather see him with something like 600AD with a more reasonable AS in a DPS build 😛

Any ideas for his Q? Will it stay the same?

Â Â FeralPony:Â I think shifting him a bit more in the fighter/tank direction is very natural and makes a lot of sense to fit the overall unkilling/juggernaut theme. This would involve retaining CC and mostly likely increasing the amount of CC on his kit. The current kit actually hasÂ a tonÂ of CC, we’ll see how it plays out internally before I go into more details on it though.

Â Suggestion: Sion’s new ult throws his target in a direction

Â Â FeralPony:Â Thematically it’s super awesome and I tried this in the very first prototype. I even had a version of it where champions thrown into walls would bounce off back into Sion (Pro Wresting Style) but I really didn’t like how it played out when I actually implemented it and played with it.

It basically felt like a more frustrating/crazy strong Skarner Ultimate with clunkier targeting. I had to slash so much power out of the rest of the kit because it was basically a guaranteed death sentence to the enemy in any team fight that the rest of the character felt pretty unsatisfying.

The scenario of throwing someone back into their team (the cool play) almost never occurred, instead it devolved into just flipping them into Sion’s team every single time which is a much less cool version of the skill.